For Norman, GG and any closet lovers of Proust....

[mint]

[url]https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/17/the-guardian-view-on-new-work-from-proust-more-lessons-from-lockdown[/url]

[NormanH]

I don't need to actually read Proust. Someone sent me an excellent idiot's guide...[:D]

"How Proust Can Change Your Life" by Alain Bottin

[Gardengirl]

? ? ? Norman!

Goodness, Mint, a road map to ALRDTP - what a discovery!

Have any of you read the whole work rather than volume 1?

That could have been an excellent project for this year of going nowhere and doing nothing, but not one I thought of.

[anotherbanana]

Better stick to Mills and Boone, at least they have an ending.

[mint]

Alas, GG, I would have to read the books in translation!

To paraphrase a pianist who said of one of Mozart's piano concertos that it has too many notes, I will have to say of ALRDTP that it has too many French words[:)]

PS

Forgot to mention Jean Santeuil which is thought to be a precursor of à la recherche and indeed the main story line does give a close ressemblance to the latter work.  Now this, although hefty, is manageable and I enjoyed large parts of it.

In Marcel Proust: Life and works

…1895 to 1899 he wrote Jean Santeuil, an autobiographical novel that, though unfinished and ill-constructed, showed awakening genius and foreshadowed À la recherche.

A gradual disengagement from social life coincided with growing ill

health and with his active involvement in the Dreyfus affair of 1897–99,

when French politics and society…